We have been pushing onwards as the spring gathers pace. Gardening every day of the Easter week to stay in the race that is April. Mulching after divisions were made in the garden and emptying the frames of plants that were kept there for winter protection, but now need their feet in the ground to harness this new energy. There has been a frenzy of pricking out autumn sown seedlings to continue their journey and the getting to know that only really happens when you raise your own plants rather than buy them in and so missing their infancy. The seedlings fill the gaps made so recently in the frames to begin the new order of a fresh growing season. 

We have been heads down in the doing, but trying to remember to look up, for it is easy to miss the moment when the spring is moving this fast. Willow catkins alive with bees and the silver shimmer in the poplars as first buds eclipse bare branches. In their long-fingered shadows on the slopes below, the snakeshead fritillaries lose their loftiness as they are consumed by new meadow and the company the grass keeps around them. The cowslips taking over from the primroses and the bluebells we have been sowing annually from locally sourced seed, showing well for the first time with their luminous blue.